CONTEMPORARY FICTION THAT LOOKS LIKE US
![N. Cyril Fischer](volume_images/ncyrilfischer-self.jpg)
by
N. CYRIL FISCHER
____________________________________________________________
N. Cyril Fischer
is an academic and translator. He has edited and introduced the
essay collection Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday
(Lexington 2018) and currently is a postdoctoral fellow in the
English department at the Freie Universität Berlin. He also
serves as the translations editor for the Swiss publishing house
Präsens Editionen.
“You
and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion
and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now,
after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and
you still share a quarter of your genes.” This is the opening
of The Secret Forest, an immensely successful contemporary
non-fiction book on arboreal life by the botanist Patricia Westerford.
Its central contention—that humans and trees are not as
unlike as each other as one might think and that, therefore, the
former should not be regarded as intrinsically superior to the
latter—is as timely as it is scientifically controversial.
For Westerford, the book’s success marks the vindicating
ending to a painful tale of academic denigration, patronization,
and exclusion. Half a decade prior, while completing her doctorate,
Westerford came to the conclusion that trees exhibit a fundamentally
human ability: they recognize their own kin and communicate with
them in order to ensure their survival. Measuring the output of
arboreal gases for her dissertation project, she finds that trees
infected with parasites release gases to inform other trees of
the same kind in the vicinity about the imminent danger. In other
words, she finds that trees talk to each other. Mindful of the
problem of suggesting too great a kinship between human and non-human
beings within a scientific tradition defined by a (still) laudable
aversion to any formulation of the pathetic fallacy, Westerford
made sure that her research was published in a sober format: chemical
measurements acquired with a gas chromatographer. Nothing but
data. Without success. The implication of likeness between the
human and non-human triggered a vicious reaction from the academic
community, and her work was widely discredited by leading scholars
in the field. Only much later, after Westerford lost her research
position, fell into poverty, and came within a hair’s breadth
of suicide, her findings were confirmed.
More
studies, more measurements involving different kinds of trees
in different regions, more and more data, all substantiated Westerford’s
initial insight. While little doubt remains about the validity
of her research, towards the end of her career she found that
nothing had changed about her colleagues’ resistance to
the suggestion that humans and trees are alike. In a keynote speech
given at a climate-change conference, she diagnosed this reluctance
as the result of an essentially warped way of looking at the world:
“We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in
other species. So we make sure nothing looks like us.” This
problem can be understood as the conscious rejection of one of
the stranger evolutionary adaptations of the mind, with which
Westerford once found herself confronted during a seed collection
trip to the Amazonian rain forest.
At one
point during the expedition, Westerford recalls, she and her Brazilian
guides encountered a tree that left them all awestruck: “In
knots and whorls, muscles arise from the smooth bole. It’s
a person, a woman, her torso twisted, her arms lifting from her
sides in finger branches.” The figure’s face is so
human, so “round with alarm, stares so wildly,” she
finds herself unable to hold its gaze. The guides try to explain
the figure as the product of human interference and craftsmanship,
but no knife or chisel marks can be found. Westerford offers a
theory: “Pareidolia . . . the adaptation that makes people
see people in all things.” It is a scientific explanation
of a deeply unscientific impulse: to ascribe human qualities to
an entity outside of oneself, and thereby to attribute a human-like
subjectivity to an external entity. While this impulse is unscientific,
as the vicious backlash against Westerford’s suggestion
that trees “talk” to each other demonstrates, it will
be deeply familiar to literary scholars, particularly those specializing
in the novel. Instead of pareidolia, the impulse to recognize
oneself in the other is more commonly discussed under the heading
of sympathy—based on eighteenth-century philosophical work
on ethics, most prominently Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral
Sentiments, and its re-purposing for literary aesthetics by nineteenth-century
novelists, such as George Eliot who maintained that “the
extension of our sympathies” is the novel’s greatest
quality.
Sympathy
in the tradition of the novel, however, has one characteristic
that makes it less attractive for scientists like Westerford:
it traditionally is only aimed at humans, from the novels of George
Eliot to those of David Foster Wallace, for whom fiction (still)
is about “what it is to be human.” Sympathetic identification
relies on the conviction that there is something shared about
the human condition that can serve as the basis for intersubjective
understanding. To put it differently, novelistic sympathy is a
process of recognizing likeness in otherness. While novels have
long restricted this otherness to the human realm, scientists
have been extending it to other realms.
Suzanne
Simard, currently a professor of Forest and Conservation Science
at the University of British Columbia, champions the concepts
of “mother trees” and “forest wisdom”
within the scientific context. Comparable to Westerford’s
early work, Simard’s research has found that trees trade
water, carbon, and nutrients by means of underground fungal networks.
In such networks, the oldest trees are connected to more trees
than any others and are capable of identifying their kin and privilege
them in the nutrient exchange. In other words, these trees mother
their offspring. In a recent interview, Simard explains her controversial
choice of vocabulary. Her terms represent a conscious effort to
go beyond the neutral language of science in order to acknowledge
aspects of forest life that such language cannot accommodate.
Simard finds that only a more human(istic) rhetoric allows people
to “understand deeper, more viscerally, what’s going
on in these living creatures, species that are not just these
inanimate objects . . . we as human beings can relate to this
better. If we can relate to it, then we’re going to care
about it more. If we care about it more, then we’re going
to do a better job of stewarding our landscapes.” Simard’s
argument closely resembles that of George Eliot about the ability
of great novelists to bring readers “into that attention
to what is apart from themselves,” with the marked difference
that she extends sympathy to non-human beings. This creates an
ironic situation in which science adopts features of literature
at a time when literature seems to be moving on from it since
sympathetic identification has increasingly been challenged as
both an aesthetic and moral strategy by novelists in the twentieth
century.
In the
past few decades, novelists have gone through great lengths to
demonstrate in what ways the novel exhausts its potential to bridge
intersubjective divides, or how the very attempt to use novelistic
form to reach across to the other often results in an exercise
of power, the execution of a will-to-sympathy—to put others
in your shoes rather than the other way around. In the twenty-first
century, novelists have been dealing with the ramification of
this critique, struggling to reconcile the knowledge of the novel’s
limitations with the desire to write fiction, and to prove that
fiction and imaginative projection (still) matters. In pursuit
of the same project in the late nineties, Jonathan Franzen put
it more bluntly: Why bother? Contemporary fiction’s answer
is the pursuit of alternative forms of conceiving of otherness
than sympathy, comparable to that of scientists like Westerford
who seek new ways of understanding the natural world that is sympathetic
yet also not based on the idea of a shared human nature. Pareidolia
offers such a hermeneutic strategy that might come to define the
intersection of novelistic and scientific practice in a time in
which the only solution to the demise of the planet might be a
new way of understanding the radical alterity of the non-human.
Pareidolia
represents the underside of sympathy. It is involuntary and requires
no mental effort and it can by definition only apply to non-human
entities (there is little limit to which entities can be the subject
of pareidolia as #iseefaces demonstrates). Unlike sympathy, the
pareidolic imagination does not locate likeness in otherness,
but ramifies otherness through an initial apprehension of likeness.
This quality is what salvages pareidolia for scientific purposes,
as the figure in the rain forest indicates. It both cautions humanity
not to create a future in which, as Westerford imagines the Virgin
Mary saying, “you can see nothing but yourself, everywhere
you look,” and never to recognize human traits in other
species, as she argues in her keynote address. The figure in the
tree exteriorizes the human impulse to impose itself on the world;
yet, it also has the potential to shock people into the realization
that the distinction between the human and the natural, to which
we have been habituated by various socio-cultural media including
the sympathetic novel, is no longer viable. Unlike Simard, who
adopts the sympathetic approach of the novel, Westerford exhibits
a greater reluctance to borrow from literary aesthetics and instead
settles on pareidolia. Interestingly, Simard is a real and esteemed
scientist, while Westerford exists only as one of nine protagonists
of Richard Powers’ eco-novel The Overstory, published
last year. If this seems surprising, one should consider that
sympathy bears a certain affinity to science since it essentially
is a data-driven form of understanding.
Sympathy
in the traditional novel relies on the provision of details on
which the sympathetic imagination can seize, and it is not a coincidence
that the nineteenth century, in which sympathy became the central
feature of the novelistic imagination, generally is characterized
by an obsession with information collection. The age didn’t
just witness the rapacious accumulation of knowledge in the imperial
centres of Europe; it also witnessed the frustration of processing
an ever-growing corpus of information. The first alphabetical
catalogue of the library at the British Museum was published in
seven octavo volumes between 1813 and 1819. The influx of new
books in the next thirty years alone was so immense that the handwritten
additions to these volumes required an additional sixty-seven
folio volumes. By 1850 the (still) chronically incomplete catalogue
had visitors constantly complaining. The means of dealing with
an incessant influx of information had not yet been devised. The
novel promised such a means of structuring relevant information
in such a way as to allow readers to imaginatively re-construct
the inner lives of other people. The advent of big data and the
ever-increasing number of means for storing and managing new data
volumes did not produce a solution to this problem, but primarily
highlighted the limitations of what data-based understanding.
A brief look at one of the most common everyday experiences with
smart data-based understanding, the algorithm behind Netflix and
Spotify suggestions, will demonstrate the problem that has led
contemporary fiction to seek other ways of understanding than
sympathy.
Netflix
and Spotify employ methods of pattern recognition that primarily
rely on the user’s preferences and those of people who consume
the same films and music as them. In my case, they are at times
so eerily accurate that I cannot help but feeling understood by
them, which itself triggers a sympathetic impulse to discern a
human consciousness behind the math. This feeling, however, usually
is as short-lived as it is limited, not simply because the machines
that drive these processes (still) need to be improved, but because
they can only work from the assumption that my behaviour is a
total representation of myself. The immanent problem of pattern-recognition
is that there is no outside. Whatever lies beyond the data set
that provides the basis for analysis is non-existent. It might
seem obvious that Netflix or Spotify cannot learn about my preferences
for films and music not offered by them, but this is a point that
has greater implications. Even among the things on offer, our
consumer histories frustrate the pattern. The algorithm cannot
account for the things we consume for the sake of someone else,
for example. The things we only watch or listen to because others
prefer them (dinner party playlists adjusted to suit everyone,
films watched to indulge friends and lovers, etc). It is true
that pattern recognition is sophisticated enough to identify aberrations
from the norm and to isolate them as such, but that doesn’t
go to the core of the problem. Let me give you a personal example.
I don’t
particularly like gory films, nor have I watched a lot of Italian
movies or films featuring witches. How would an algorithm know
that I am fond of Suspiria? Some of my guilty pleasures
are camp movies featuring killer sharks (Deep Blue Sea)
or surrealistic humans (the Real Housewives series).
Unlike Italian avant-garde horror, I usually try to conceal these
preferences from the world and my streaming services by watching
them somewhere else. Thankfully, no algorithm can (yet) account
for the influence my social anxiety and misguided sense of self-worth
has on my movie selection (I also once started watching Inland
Empire and let it play in its entirety on its own after I had
lost in order to maintain my perfect viewing record with David
Lynch movies). Of course, algorithms are not set up to fully understand
humans, nor to explain them, but their working serves as an important
example of how one can think about sympathy and the way humans
apperceive other (human and non-human) beings. It demonstrates
that they are (still) inadequate in capturing what is most human
about people—in my case, my anxieties, insecurities, and
my immense pettiness. The obvious retort would be to suggest that
the only reason an algorithm could not capture these aspects of
myself is exactly because the relevant data was not provided,
but that is to suggest that otherness can be reduced to pure knowledge,
which is as utopian a thought as it is dystopian. Its ethos is
sympathetic as it presumes the possibility of converting otherness
to likeness through data, the idea being that with enough information
anything can be rendered comprehensible. In this perspective,
it makes sense that Simard is drawn to sympathetic identification
and the idea that otherness can be decoded as an underlying likeness,
while Westerford/Powers are drawn to the apprehension of the full
complexity of otherness through an initial shock of self-recognition:
to make people stop to consider the complexity of a tree as an
organism through the apparition of a human figure in the bark
instead of having them pass by without noting the environmental
background so easily taken for granted. This is in fact how Powers
initially had the idea for the novel when he came across a giant
redwood tree during a teaching stint at Stanford that led him
to the realize that he had been blind to “these amazing
creatures.” Creature is the operative word here since it
both implies likeness and otherness. And while it was the sheer
size of the tree that made him think about trees in a different
fashion (rather than a figure in the bark), he transfers this
effect to the ambivalent pareidolic imagination in the novel,
admonishing readers not to ultimately identify with the natural
world, but to seek a deeper understanding of otherness through
the initial admission of likeness, or the pareidolic rather than
the sympathetic imagination.
Another
example of how pareidolia can frame an intersubjective encounter
can be found in Jessie Greengrass ‘s debut novel Sight,
also published last year. The novel deals with the narrator and
protagonist’s coming to terms with being a mother, and thinking
about her relationships with her own mother and grandmother. Following
her mother’s death, the narrator makes daily visits to a
library in London and haphazardly reads through the shelves in
the hope of finding a way out of grief through the form of recognition
novel reading has taught her: “I had been reduced to nothing,
and now I sought amongst so many books a way to understand myself
by analogy, a pattern recognised in other lives which might be
drawn across my own to give it shape and, given shape, to give
it impetus, direction.” This is the kind of pattern recognition
an algorithm could potentially perform if we fed enough data into
it. The narrator does find instances of life stories that help
her think about her own life – all of them drawn from non-fiction,
such as the biographies of Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered
X-rays, and Anna Freud, daughter of the inventor of psychoanalysis
– but in one of the most incisive moments of her life, she
finds herself confronted with the inability to find a comparison
anywhere. When she sees an ultrasound image of her daughter for
the first time, she is struck by its strangeness, its non-humanness.
It almost seems to alienate her from herself, to the extent that
in an effort to understand what is happening to her, and what
it is going to happen, she pins the first ultrasound image of
her daughter next to a clipping from an article featuring a photograph
of the planet surface of Titan, one of Jupiter’s moons above
her desk:
Looking
at both of them, side by side or separately, I felt the same:
a kind of plunging incomprehension, an absolute inability to
make sense. These two things – a view of the ground in
the outer solar system and a picture of the inside of my own
body, of the entity that had taken root there to build itself
cell by cell towards an articulated experience of grass in sunshine
or the smell of violets – exists beyond the boundaries
of my constructed world, the navigable realm of named things,
and into that shadowy distance which was still unmade, which
had neither colour nor warmth but only spectrum and could not
be spoken of except through simile (to say ‘it is like
this other thing’ and feel the point has not been made)
and I could not incorporate them: they would be neither magnified
nor reduced and nor could they be imagined beyond these representations
of them which were themselves little more than metaphor.
This
passage captures the contradictory impulses at work in the act
of apprehending otherness, comparable to the juxtaposition of
disbelief and acceptance of the humanness of figure in the tree
in The Overstory. Too much will-to-sympathy, too much
pareidolia, leads to falsification. When the narrator wonders
why she finds that the images of Titan make for a better comparison
with her child than images of Mars and “those three-dimensional
images of babies in utero,” she concludes that it is because
the latter have been smoothed out to resemble the pre-existing
patterns of our imagination. These images suffer from a surfeit
of quality, they resemble too much “the images of things
that are familiar: a stretch of January field, unploughed; a doll.
Their strangeness has been made unrecognizable by the sharpness
of their edges and although what they depict is as far from the
familiar as before, they have been brought by the exactitude of
these analogies within the confines of the real.” As in
Powers, the pareidolic impulse becomes destructive when
it is carried too far. Instead of sharpening one’s awareness
of otherness in the world through a glimpsed similarity that hints
at unknown and unknowable depths, it simply overwrites it. Titan
offers a balancing weight. It functions as a reminder of our own
imaginative insufficiencies.
Contemporary
novels admonish us that radical alterity is something we must
not just recognize, but labour to maintain. They remind us that
holding on to otherness is more important now than ever since
quantification and the possibility of dealing with ever larger
data sets will continually chip away at otherness and move us
closer to the dream of singular understanding. Many things can
be understood through quantification; radical alterity (still)
can’t. The more data we have, the more patterns we establish,
the more aberrations we will find that lead us away from singular
understanding towards the apprehension of an infinitude of singularities.
With more information, we would become more ensconced in our pasts,
our futures laid out according to preconceived patterns. We would
become beings most untimely, as Nietzsche feared, not so much
learning from the past, but being paralyzed by it. The novel has
a reason for celebrating its shortcoming in this regard because
this is might be its mission in the twenty-first century: not
just to prove that understanding otherness is a never-ending endeavor,
but that what we seek to understand might have to be even more
radical other than we have imagined until now. And that’s
why one should still bother.